The scale development of organizational culture on customer delight

Purpose The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a hospitality cultural scale for measuring the effect of organizational culture on customer delight (OCCD). Design/methodology/approach A literature review and focus group discussion were conducted to generate an initial item pool. Subsequently, three individual samples of hotel employees were identified to develop and validate the OCCD scale. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted for item purification and factor extraction, and confirmatory factor analysis verified the factor structure of the OCCD construct. Finally, several validity tests were examined to further support the OCCD construct. Findings The results of the analyses indicated that the OCCD construct contains eight factors: the customer delight service control system, expected competencies for customer delight, shared values for customer delight, employee empowerment for customer delight, expected norms for customer delight, superior service environment, customer delight competency development and customer delight service scripting. These factors reflect theories of cultural layers. Practical implications The developed OCCD scale can provide hospitality managers a self-evaluation and diagnostic instrument to enable their cultural improvement. In addition, OCCD scale can garner employee consensus and further facilitate the effectiveness of human resources management. Originality/value This study developed an organizational cultural scale to explore the importance of customer delight in the hospitality industry. It expanded academically the current knowledge of organizational culture and customer delight.